Speech Acts, Effects, and Responses

Taking John Searle’s discussion of conversation as its point of departure, this paper examines the relationship between individual speech acts and conversational sequences. Instead of inquiring whether one can extend speech act theory to the study of conversation, it argues that the study of speech acts already presupposes some reference to conversational sequences. This is so because the hearer’s uptake, which is necessary for an illocutionary act to take effect, is indicated by the hearer’s response. This makes the success of illocutionary acts of any kind “conditional” on the hearer’s behavior (in a sense which should be kept distinct from the sense in which some illocutionary acts produce conditional obligations). The shift in illocutionary force that may occur when an utterance appears to be infelicitous under one interpretation but not under another, as well as the functioning of adjacency pairs, are both discussed in this light.